Gladiators: Servious Pompeius and... um... Tiberius...? (Jackson’s first character… unfortunately he died in this game and Jackson erased and reused his card before I got the stats… so… no stats for Tiberius…)

Lucious wanted a bit more of a challenge so he fought a Lion, solo… As the lions weren’t enough of a challenge this one was a full wildcard (though with only two bennies…). The game did last a bit longer… with Lucious the ultimate victor.

At one point Monotonous danced away from his melee with Beauteus, to join Sonja battling Varro. Beauteus took the opportunity to engage Sonja – which proved a bad move. She turned and dealt him a serious blow.

Now the Maximus brothers are pretty lads and favourites of the crowd (Very Attractive, +4 charisma) so Beauteus considered taking a dive… then saw the devilish gleem in sonja’s eyes and knew she would show him no mercy – even if the crowd demanded it… He fought on, but not for long

Monotonous deeked out his melee with Varro just in time to join Sonja as she dealt a killing blow to Beauteus.

Varro made a dash to aid Marcus in his battle with Gorgeus – hoping to take him down and level the field a bit…

Monotonous and Sonja dashed over and joined the fray!

Varro went down and was dispatched by Sonja.

Marcus fought on valiantly – against THREE – but was eventually overcome…

Round Up

Well… life is short and brutal for a Gladiator… Servious Pompeius, who came out of the last weeks games with a level-up was pushing up daisies after his first game this week. Sura is now the top survivor – with 5 experience points and having played in three weeks of games – but is now suffering from critical injuries and showing no sign of recovering any time soon.

What will next week bring…? Rumor has it Christian has bought a pair of Pictish fanatics to join his Ludus. Amanda has a retiarius she’s training up for next week. When with John’s Blue Ludus make their appearance..?

At this point they condemned men went on hold and awaited the approaching gladiators…

Servious Pompeius was the first to charge in and the condemned interrupted – their only success in the whole bout(!) – They surrounded him and started flailing wildly at him…

…it looked potentially bad because help was still a move away… For all their faliling, thought, the convicts were unable to land a blow. Pompeius knocked one on his ass and turned to the others.

Sura was the next in and took one down with a single, mighty blow.

The next round Mediocritus charged in and knocked down another. Before Necrophilius could get there (toiling under the load of his armour…), Servious Pompeius, had dispatched the remaining condemned man and that was the end of the game…

Pheidippides Argupoulos, being “arrogant” thought killing condemned men beneath him and sought something a little more challenging.

Niiiiice kitty….

I threw him in the arena with a lion. I was looking at the lion and thinking; “Wow, they look pretty bad ass…” so I left it a common “extra” lion and charged in.

Parry 10 is pretty tough to beat. Fighting d12 and Strength d10 isn’t anything to sniff at either… The lion got the first attack – pouncing (+4 attack, +4 damage, improved frenzy) and failed to hit… Argupoulos cleaved the poor kitty’s head in two with one blow.

Maybe I need to make lions a bit tougher…

So experience gathered, no wounds taken… we dicided to carry on with the “second week” of our campaign…

Pheidippides Argupoulos took on both Necrophilius and Servious Pompeius because he is awesome, at least in his own mind.

There was a bit of trash talking – trying to taunt or intimidate… but after a few unsuccessful tries everyone more or less resorted to bashing on each other. Eventually that gave way to Wild Attacks… slowly whittling away each others bennies.

At one point Argupoulos was shaken… things looked bad as he was unable to recover right away.

Finally Sura landed a telling blow – Mediocritus suffered THREE wounds and decided to take a dive.

The crowd took pity on the downed gladiator who had fought so gallantly and called for him to be spared….

Sura rushed to her team mates aid – but for her troubles she got a bash in the face as Argupoulos turned to see who was harmlessly banging on his helmet from behind.

A turn or two later Argupoulos ran out of awesomeness (or luck… or whatever…) and the three took him down. Not a crowd favourite he was shown no mercy and was dispatched to the roar of thunderous applause!

Rick showed up late part way through this game so I threw him against a lion as well.

We will definitely see a couple new gladiators next week as Patrick will be fielding a replacement and Chrisitan will have to leave Publius Gnaeus Mediocritus in the hospital for at least a few weeks. Will Rick and Amanda fight on with their wounded gladiators? Will Oezalces Fuscina make an appearance? Find out next week!!

When wounded check for damage on armour:If shield and armour always check the lower quality if of equal quality, determine randomly.Roll d6 for inferior, d8 for average, or d10 for superiorpass = no damage, fail = damageddamaged armour has -1 protection value until repaired. Cost of repair is 25% cost of armour – or can be repaired by the gladiator with successful repair roll and 10% cost of armour.

Take A DiveYou don’t have to fight to incapacitation all the time… After you take at least one wound you can take a dive, or beg for mercy from the audience, but you are at -1 for each wound short of incapacitated for your thumb roll (i.e. -1 is at three wounds, -2 if at two wounds, -3 if it one wound).

Wounds and RecoveryWe will assume a week goes by between rounds and thus injured characters will have an opportunity to recover between matches. We will assume they have doctors and a relatively pampered life – so there will be no negative modifiers beyond the wound modifiers.

I may also come up with a random “scenario” table (one-on-one, pairs, teams, vs. wild animals, vs. condemned men/slaves, etc.)

I am also considering using Showdown rules – so there will be a fortune and calamity table (though there may likely be some changes… out of ammo, for example, would be quite useless) and a random events table…

Stay tuned for Gladiator Profiles and reports of the action at the colosseum!